is the title of an article in Wired Magazine UK Edition, May-14. It is about Wolfram Language.
In his post Functional Goats, Wolves and Lions, Sascha provides a first glance how its functional programming style can be used to build a language bottom up.
Knowledge-based programming
This is, how Stephen Wolfram describes it. It comes from the concepts, design and technologies that are realized in Mathematica (already providing a symbolic language for everything) and Wolfram|Alpha (the computational knowledge engine).
It is about describing things in computational terms.
A symbolic language
The idea of symbolic languages is to represent things in the same way. A symbol can describe a mathematical expression, graph, geometrical object, movie, … and even a program. A representation in the symbolic way means, they are pieces of data.
In the context of the puzzle, Sascha decided, to solve the problem without mathematical shortcuts. For readability.
The algorithmic knowledge base
But for many problems algorithmic maths is indispensable. And knowledge-based programming needs and algorithmic knowledge base. And you are lucky if you have organized things orthogonally. Their description, models and methods. This makes it easy to describe things in computational terms.
Knowledge based programming means: yours system needs a symbolic Language and an Engine implementing it.
UnRisk Financial Language atop Wolfram Language
13 years ago, we made a fundamental decision. To wrap our derivative valuation engine with Mathematica language. We inherited the symbolic language constructs and an algorithmic knowledge base. The other way around: we extended Mathematica into the world of derivative and risk analytics.
From that date on we built UnRisk in a bottom-up fashion. The financial language and the algorithmic base become richer and richer. And it gets easier and easier to make the system platform agnostic, inherently parallel, in the cloud, ….
And any quant developer can do the same. In an extremely short amount of time. Like us.
UnRisk a symbolic and numerical computation engine
To give full explanation on how it works, we have established the UnRisk Academy. One of its reference classes goes to Frankfurt and Zurich soon. A Workout in Computational Finance
Picture from sehfelder
